Meet the men who carved $96B out of Apple’s market value

FORTUNE — See on the chart at right where Apple’s AAPL share price dropped to just over $540 shortly after 3 p.m. Wednesday?

That corresponds roughly to when the fund manager pictured above left, DoubleLine Capital’s Jeffrey Gundlach, told a room packed with investment managers that he was shorting Apple. “I just wonder how many people will queue up around the block for an iPad 87,” he said.

David Einhorn

See where the share price popped back up just before the closing bell? That happened after the next speaker, David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital, a hedge fund famous for taking very large short positions, said Grundlach was flat wrong. Apple won’t lose its appeal if it stops making a new hit product every year. That “assumes that Apple is a hardware company. It’s not,” he said, according to the Wall Street Journal‘s account of the meeting. “Apple is a software company. Its value comes from iOS, the App Store, iTunes and iCloud.”

According to Einhorn, hedge funds own only 5% of Apple’s 935 million shares, as if to suggest that weren’t enough to make a dent in the stock price.

But those funds are managed by guys who know a thing or two about leverage.

So if you are wondering who could have brought Apple’s share price down more than $100 from its all-time high of $644 on April 9 to its low for the day of $541.04 — carving $96 billion out of the company’s market cap in the process — you might start with the men who gathered Wednesday in Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall for the Ira Sohn Conference to talk about the market and raise money for pediatric cancer research